Hitori nomi nagamete chirinu ume no hana shiru bakari naru hito wa toi kozu

English Translation

Alone, only I
gazed at them, and they have gone
the plum's flowers fell
and no one who knows enough
to know them came to visit

Meaning

I looked at them alone, and they fell: the plum blossoms. No one who could have appreciated them ever came.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 54

Headnote: topic unknown.
This poem closes the run on plum. Where the fifty-first invited a visitor, here the flowers fall with no one having come, so that an invitation and its failure answer each other. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Hachijoin no Takakura was a lady-in-waiting and poet in the service of Princess Shoshi, known as Hachijoin, a daughter of Emperor Toba. Her dates are not recorded.
The time is the fall of the plum; the place is the poet's own dwelling.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

A limiting particle in the first line gives the sense of by myself alone, and the poem opens on solitude.
The second line means that they fell while she was still looking at them; the perfect auxiliary marks the thing as already over.
The third line names the object and closes the upper half.
The fourth line describes a person who would have understood the flowers' worth, using a word of degree.
The poem ends flatly on a negative. Saigyo's fifty-first poem called someone to come; this one ends with no one coming. Invitation and absence stand side by side, and the run on plum closes with the visitor never arriving.

Author

Hachijoin no Takakura

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other